Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday March 11, 2012 @07:22PM
from the just-tell-me-who-to-blame dept.

An anonymous reader writes "While living in Paris, Ben Franklin was struck by how many hours of daylight were being wasted to sleep during the summer months. He wrote an open letter to a Parisian journal lamenting the wasted expenditures on candlewax, and presented his back-of-the-quillpad estimates of the cost savings if the entire population arose an hour or two earlier. However, Franklin did not specifically mention moving the clocks ahead; instead, he suggested official means for enforcement (rationing the sale of candlewax to families) and encouragement (ringing church bells at sunrise). The clock-shifting technique which we know and love was credited to the New Zealander George Vernon Hudson, who proposed it in 1895. DST was first widely adopted by warring countries during World War I as a way of conserving coal needed for military purposes. This launched a debate over DST's usefulness that continues to the present day (particularly by people stumbling about in their bathrooms). Of course, Franklin is also associated with other questionable ideas, including bifocals, lightning rods, electric current flowing from the positive to negative terminal, leaking official documents to fan opposition, and an independent United States of America."
New research suggests the daylight saving time change will lead to lower productivity tomorrow as the lost sleep makes workers more likely to slack (PDF).

As the summary mentions, Ben's argument was basically that "early to bed and early to rise" saved energy. Getting up with the sun and going to sleep earlier in the evening reduced the need for lamp oil. And while we use electricity instead of lamp oil, this argument is still used today.

However, when you consider that lighting is becoming more and more efficient and most of our personal energy consumption now goes to heating and cooling, the picture changes. Since the Earth takes time to warm and cool each day, the daily temperature cycle lags behind the sun by a few hours. Getting up early in the winter just means more energy spent heating your home and office, and working late in the day during summer means high A/C bills.

Plus, most people want some daylight time outside the typical 8-5 work window. There's no reason to line up the work day with daylight hours; these days, most people are cooped up in office buildings and don't really care whether it's light or dark out. And commuting during sunrise or sunset is dangerous, so that's another good reason to offset the workday from the sun cycle.

Finally, studies have shown that a period of bright light, preferably sunlight, is important for our health during the winter months. So yet again it makes no sense to align the workday with the daylight cycle, since commuters at northern latitudes only see a bit of dawn and dusk during their commute and are stuck indoors during the bright part of the day.

While it may be a bit extreme, I think the ideal solution is to start the workday a couple hours past sunrise in the winter and a couple hours before sunrise in the summer. You'll be active during the warmest hours of winter and cooler hours in summer, you'll have free time during daylight hours year round, you'll commute to work in bright sunlight during the winter, and you'll avoid staring into the sun while commuting most of the year. Of course, nobody would want to a several-hour time change, so it would be better to spread it out: Lose a minute every night for half the year, then gain a minute each night for the other half. In addition, there could also be a couple jumps during the year to help avoid commuting at dawn/dusk. Getting people to accept waking up before dawn during summer and having sunset in the middle of the afternoon during winter might still take some work, but I think it would be safer, healthier, and more efficient for everyone.

As the summary mentions, Ben's argument was basically that "early to bed and early to rise" saved energy.

Yes, but note that while he's saying go to bed early, he also admits to not getting home and to bed until 3AM and notes that he never sees the sun before noon. If anything, I like him more after reading that bit.

I assume your joking but just in case. Hemp and Marijuana are not the same plant. They come from the same species of plant but you cant smoke hemp to get high. It only contains minute amounts of the psychoactive drug, not enough for any physical or psychological effects. The US was a huge producer of hemp before it was outlawed. It can be used to make clothes/paper/plastic/ and just about anything else you can think of. It is still illegal in the US to grow "industrial" hemp because people and the government are to fucking stupid and scream "think of the children" every time even though it is not a drug.

While it may be a bit extreme, I think the ideal solution is to start the workday a couple hours past sunrise in the winter and a couple hours before sunrise in the summer. You'll be active during the warmest hours of winter and cooler hours in summer, you'll have free time during daylight hours year round,

No you would be cooped up in an office during the warmest hours of winter and the cooler hours in summer. All your free time would be during the hottest hours of summer and the coldest hours of winter. That sounds like a good way for office buildings to save heating/cooling expenses, but would increase residential expenses, and make it less enjoyable to spend your free time outside.

For someone in the warmer latitudes, what I would like to see is the opposite. Leave winter hours as they are, and then shift the clock an hour later in the summer. That way you spend the hottest hours in the office, it will have cooled off by the time you are getting ready for bed, and you have time in the morning when it is cooler to spend outside before going to work.

While it may be a bit extreme, I think the ideal solution is to start the workday a couple hours past sunrise in the winter and a couple hours before sunrise in the summer. You'll be active during the warmest hours of winter and cooler hours in summer, you'll have free time during daylight hours year round, you'll commute to work in bright sunlight during the winter, and you'll avoid staring into the sun while commuting most of the year.

Hmm, if you do that, I'll move to Michigan in the winter, but go south

A better solution is not night-shifts (very damaging to longevity), but staggered work-days, with some starting at 7, some at 8, some at 9. That way there are fewer people trying to reach their destination at the same time of day. Shorter work-days would result in many people having slightly less pay, however they would have more leisure hours, and overall unemployment would go down.

I used to live in northern Western Australia which never got around to making DST permanent (they trial it from time to time). We just started school at 8am and finished at 2:30pm instead of starting at 9am and finishing at 3:30pm. That was more a result of climate than DST but it still worked just fine and meant that we could do whatever worked best for us without imposing any changes to the southern part of the state. Leaving the clocks alone and just starting your day at a different time makes a lot more

Huh? The only reason to work longer hours is if the country is not producing enough to feed everyone. But is that true?

If the country is producing enough to feed everyone and you have too few jobs and too many workers why not:a) work shorter hours?b) work the same hours, but give everyone a basic income so that the jobless don't need jobs to survive?

If the country is not producing enough to feed everyone, then it's screwed in the long run. You can hide it by going into debt or other tricks, but the real solution is to figure out a way to increase productivity.

People with no hope of finding jobs stealing stuff from me does not increase productivity.

If the country is producing enough to feed everyone and you have too few jobs and too many workers why not:
a) work shorter hours?

In the US, as long as benefits - esp. health care - are connected to "full-time" employment as a binary relationship, this won't happen. It's in the interest of the employer to have as few people as possible at "full-time", and low-wage jobs are notorious for cutting off workers at 34.5 hours, or whatever the threshold is for the state.

I would GLADLY work 3/4 the hours for 3/4s the pay and 3/4s the health insurance, but it doesn't work like that.

If we had "single-payer" health insurance, you'd see a LOT more variety in working schedules, and we'd have fuller employment; the same number of hours would be worked (disallowing any network effects from single-payer insurance) but more people would be busy working them.

Each to his own, I found it a quite enjoyable break. Something appealing about going home at the crack of dawn.

Let's be real, no one invented daylights savings, clocks un-invented it. We all did it quite normally prior to the interference of, clocks and other peoples greed and demands.

Just look at all the productivity gains over the last fifty years, where did it all go, not shared around at all, most of it went to feed the greed of a psychopathic minority. Reality is we should already be down to a 4 day 6 hour per day week but the greedy are never ever satiated, no matter how much they have and more importantly how little the rest of us have.

At this time, I can work a "natural" schedule, because I'm not serving any customers.

That means getting up at around 6AM when the birds start shrieking and the sun peeks through the windows. Here in Saskatchewan we don't follow daylight savings time; we just get up earlier if we feel like it. Nobody forces us to get up early in some vindictive attempt to get more work out of us during daylight hours.

Which is odd, when you think about it, because as a farming-dominated culture, you'd think the farmer's

I live down south, and I still love DST. It maximizes the time I have for doing things outside after work. I'm at work before sunrise year-round, DST or not, so earlier daylight is useless to me. If I wasn't hamstrung by other societal stuff (damn bankers and their hours...), I'd structure my day so I'm going to bed about an hour after sunset year-round. That happens in the summer, but not so much in the winter--I'd be getting to work at 0230.

I agree, that must suck balls. I live in Chicago, pretty much as far east in the Central time zone as there is, and remember fondly a vacation in Louisville. It was light out until after 10pm. Delightful.

Are we going to abolish the stupidity of the concept of Daylight Savings Time? It saves no daylight.

There will be a higher percentage of car crashes tomorrow due to people being awake an hour earlier. Then in fall, there will be higher suicides when there is suddenly, with no logical explanation to your circadian cycle, dramatically less sunlight.

This is an abomination and really has a horrible effect on me and other each year.

When the President of the United States publicly defends DST as saving energy due to reduced lighting (from coal, something we have enough of and don't import), while the truth is more energy is spend under DST (mostly oil, which we mostly import), I have to wonder if DST isn't just a oil company conspiracy. Energy use is increased, as people are more likely to take an evening shopping trip under DST. And the economic stimulus of more unfunded spending is exactly what we need more of, right?

Are we going to abolish the stupidity of the concept of Daylight Savings Time? It saves no daylight.

It is an effective way to keep the daylight hours after work, when productive things can be done, rather than before work when nothing useful can be done because you're just going to have to go to work in a short time. We're stuck with the kludgy method of flipping clocks back and forth because we, as a society, are still wedded to the stupid 8-to-5 workday and the bankers that hold everyone else by the balls with their hours.

Full disclosure: I love DST and wish we'd stay on it all year. Light early in the morning is useless to me; I'm already at work in a windowless office by the time the sun comes up. I like having a lot of time to do things after work, and I don't get that at all in the winter--the sun's setting when I leave. If DST went on all year, I'd at least have a little light to do things first.

But so would keeping "summer hours" at various businesses. 9-5 in the winter? 8-4 in the summer! See how easy that is? No need to take something that has a real, astronomical meaning, and fiddle with it completely arbitrarily for no real benefit at all.

In fact, the greatest benefit we could get would probably be to encourage businesses to vary their working times to spread out the "rush hour" traffic. This would reduce congestion on the roads (it's not strictly linear, so even a small change could reap huge rewards), a net win for both commuters and the environment. I know that an extra half hour of real time at each end of the day spent "not commuting" would be more valuable to me than 20 "extra" hours of daylight that we got by shifting our troubles by the same amount.

I strongly disagree. It might have been easier at one point, but right now? We all deal with clocks constantly; there's no end to software hiccups, and people still forget to reset their clocks and get everything wrong. Switching clocks is the greater insanity. Varied hours are something you can get used to easily. Shift workers do it.

really?I have no idea when any business opens or closes anymore without consulting every business's website. Truly there is no real consistency. Sure you can guess that most every business opens by 10am and close after 4pm, but I'm surprised how often I'm wrong about each one too! I have to admit that stores in malls tend to keep similar hours, but that isn't 100% either.

So many business open anywhere from 7:30am to 10am in my area, and I find that if I drop by thinking some business must be open, I'm often

I'd go for that. Just the constant flipping back and forth gets me. Grew up in Eastern Indiana (Fort Wayne) where they didn't do it (Back then anyway), so I think it messes with me worse because of it.

Adjusting work hours seasonally would be more effective, and then we wouldn't have to worry about confusion from the result of the change. Even better, the changes could be more gradual and could present a change greater than an hour if that is beneficial.

Also, saying that we should stay on DST all year is idiotic. We should just do things an hour earlier.

Yes, but people will have an easier time grokking DST switches than actually moving to a different timezone. But I agree - it's 7pm and still light out, and I like that very much. The prospect of possibly leaving the office when I can see is quite appealing (the morning is irrelevant to me, as I never wake up that close to sunrise)

It is stupid I agree. Another solution would be just specify the start of the work day relative to sunrise. Ie we work from sunrise + 1 to sunrise + 9. That way the sun would always have risen when you go to work and you'd have at least 1 hour a day to get your vitamin. The current system doesn't work in Canada or europe (and further north). For most people you wake up in the winter and the sun is just starting to rise, you get to work. By the time you leave work the sun has set. You go home in the dark. Th

You're not like that already? I always need headlights for the drive home during the winter. I actually take it as a sign of approaching spring that I start to squint into the sunset on the drive home.

It made a tiny bit of sense in the old days for cities before electric power. But it made no sense for rural areas.
Now that we have this fancy thing called electricity, the entire concept is just asinine.

Except of course, they did not do Daylight Savings Time until after the development of electric lights.

This is really bad. I woke up this morning and noticed that is was noon instead of 11am like it should be. They fucking stole an hour from my life! Sure some might say I'll get it back next time we adjust the clock, but what if I don't make it to that time? It's gone, this is completely horrible.

Sleep-journal.com [sleep-journal.com]: "Results: There was a significant increase in accidents for the Monday immediately following the spring shift to DST (t=1.92, P=0.034). There was also a significant increase in number of accidents on the Sunday of the fall shift from DST (P0.002)."

Get rid of DST. Arizona has it right (no DST). Doesn't help that the whole world doesn't even follow the DST change at the same time.

This "electricity" is merely a fad and will come to nothing. Ha, and those bifocal things will cause the innocent wearer to become cross-eyed. Such dangerous radicals are not to be suffered in the King's lands!

Frankly, the system as is a chaotic mess. I find myself more and more often tempted to state HH:MM p/a GMT. It just seems like something that was good in theory about two hundred years ago, but now? Confusion. There is a reason standard time for trains considered such a great advance. DST now seems like a step backwards.

Ah, yes - GMT (or UTC) as a worldwide standard for everyday living - the idea beloved of a cadre of Unix folks, but which will never even be taken seriously (or given any thought at all, really) by anyone else.

Ah, yes - GMT (or UTC) as a worldwide standard for everyday living - the idea beloved of a cadre of Unix folks, but which will never even be taken seriously (or given any thought at all, really) by anyone else.

The standard for "invention" has dropped a long way hasn't it. The whole "getting up with the sunrise" idea from antiquity was the original dailylight savings time. It was only once people started working in dungeons...er... factories that schedules started being different from work when you can see what you're doing. You can't forget something and then remember it and replace it with a less precise system and call it an invention.

We could be doing a 24 hour schedule but we still operate businesses and offices from 9-5. Why? I see no advantage.

Yes, but it depends on how much synchronization businesses and customers that work together need.

For online businesses, a 24 hour schedule is no problem, as the customer interaction happens instantly thanks to the wonders of computers, even if it the transaction sits there for half a day afterwards, until a human can process it.

Franklin is also associated with other questionable ideas, including bifocals, lightning rods, electric current flowing from the positive to negative terminal, leaking official documents to fan opposition, and an independent United States of America

I didn't realize he postulated (or invented) the flow of electrons incorrectly!

FYI, just to clarify for all you non electrically inclined folks out there, electrons flow from the negative terminal (where a surplus of electrons are, hense the negative charge) to the positive terminal (where there is a lack of electrons.)

The fact that it does not match up with the most typical case - electrons - is only an inconvenience. There are other circumstances where the flow of charge matches the direction of electric current, such as with positive ions in an electrolyte, so either way you're going to have issues.

The purpose, as I understand it, is to make the sun not rise super early against the clock during the summer. The effect is that it reduces the range of sunrise times, while increasing the range of sunset times. In a way, it normalizes sunrises while amplifying sunsets.

Oh, and while we're at it, during a non-DST period, if the time zones were evenly split and straight with no regard to human geographic borders, then at the middle of the time zone, 12:00 (noon) would be the time that astronomical noon is (when the sun is highest in the sky), varying by about 20 minutes before and after noon. If you average all the astronomical noons over the course of a year in the middle of a time zone, then astronomical noon is at precisely 12:00. During DST, astronomical noon is moved to 1:00 pm (13:00)

Singaporeans liked the concept of Daylight Saving so much that in 1982 they moved to it permanently. Geographically they should be UTC+7 but they currently work off UTC+8.

</ useless trivia >

I can sort of see the justification for daylight "saving" nearer the poles, but for equatorial countries where the length of day varies by about 10 minutes it makes no sense. Pick a time and stick with it.

There's plenty of anomalies with time zones. In December, Moscow was 2 hours ahead of Israel despite being pretty much the same longitude. Spain is 1 hour ahead of the UK despite parts of it geographically fitting into UK-1.

Gaza has 2 spring forwards and 2 fall backs a year. At some points in the year, Israel, 1000 miles east of greece, is an hour behind.

And now we've got a confusing situation of New York being 4 hours behind London, rather than 5. Due to travel (in the u.s this weekend, back in the uk af the end of the month) I get to have my clocks go forward twice this year, and last year I missed out on the benefit of clocks going backwards as I was somewhere out east -- Israel or India or somewhere (you know you travel too much when you can't remember what countries you've been to in a given year).

Since many of us are interested in shifting clocks to allow for a more productive work day, and save lighting expenses, I propose a new twist to this system: the Workweek Saving Day. It is a very simple concept, really. Each Saturday night, instead of it becoming Sunday at the stroke of midnight, it becomes Monday. How awesome is that?! This way, we can all provide one more productive day of work to our beloved employers and do busy busy things to make the big cog-wheel turn. Come on li'l gipper, ya with me?!

At the latitude of Paris, or New York City, in the middle of summer when sunrise is around 4:30am, and your typical city dweller doesn't rise until 7 or 8, but the burns candles several hours into the night, it makes perfect sense.

In Florida, it's just stupid. Kids are going to be dropped off at school before twilight starts tomorrow morning.

Actually at the worst part of the year (for them) they're already done with their first class of the day before sunrise in the school zone I live in. I remember some years ago a teacher made a snide comment about "getting up at the crack of dawn" which pushed me over the edge and resulted in my pointing out at significant volume that it's not the crack of dawn, and it won't be for another half hour at least so by her own logic I should still be at home sleeping.